Colman Robert Hardy Daniel Andrews (Colman Andrews) (Feb. 18, 1945—) is an American writer and editor and authority on food and wine. In culinary circles, he is best known for his association with Saveur magazine, which he founded with Dorothy Kalins, Michael Grossman, and Christopher Hirsheimer in 1994 and where he served as editor-in-chief from 2001 until 2006. Since then, he has been the restaurant columnist for Gourmet. He is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Spanish cuisine, particularly that of the Catalonia region.
Born in Santa Monica, California. His father, Charles Robert Hardy Douglas Andrews, born in Effingham, Kansas, was a newspaperman, pioneering radio soap opera writer, novelist, and screenwriter . In a 1948 New Yorker article on the soaps, James Thurber mentioned Andrews and his ability to turn out “a hundred thousand words a week over a period of years, without losing a pound or a hair.” Writing speed and fecundity would eventually become something Bob’s son Colman was known for as well. Andrews’ mother was Irene Colman (née Bressette), an actress of French-Canadian descent born in Nashua, New Hampshire. She was featured as a chorus girl in Gold Diggers of 1937 alongside Lucille Ball, and also appeared in Anthony Adverse with Herbert March and Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Colman (from whom she took her stage name, the second half of which she later passed on to her son). Andrews and his sister, Ann Merry Victoria Andrews (two years his junior), grew up on an estate in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills, next door to Vincent Price. The family moved to Ojai, north of Los Angeles, in 1959, and Andrews attended Villanova Preparatory School in the same town. Even in those days, Andrews loved food; he relished dinners at the innovative Ranch House restaurant nearby and, living in a house rented from Loretta Young, he collected bags full of Ojai’s famed Valencia oranges from the small orchard out front and squeezed fresh juice from them. He also had his first job in journalism, writing community items for The Ojai Valley News for 35 cents a published column inch.
After high school, Andrews went on to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles as an English major. Kicked out of Loyola after one year for ignoring his studies in favor of the campus radio station, Andrews spent the next year-and-a-half working and traveling, at one point following a girlfriend to Atlanta and then Boston. Returning to Los Angeles, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College in 1965, studying philosophy, art history and Arabic. He took a job in the bookshop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the same year, and got to know many of the top Southern California artists of the time. In 1968, after a year-and-a-half at Los Angeles City College and a semester at California State University, Andrews was accepted at the University of California at Los Angeles. There he continued his philosophy training and also began studying European and Middle European history; he graduated in 1969 with degree in history and philosophy, and his knowledge of both would eventually become hallmarks of his food writing.
It was during his college years that Andrews began paying attention to food in a serious way. His early inspiration was Holiday magazine’s annual restaurant awards, which were founded in 1952 and presided over by Silas Spitzer. Spitzer based the awards on reports from a squad of what he termed “anonymous scouts” around the country (one of whom was James Villas, who would become the food editor of Town & Country magazine for many years). At 25, aware of the fact that as a result of his privileged upbringing he had experienced “more restaurant mealsthan many of my contemporaries would eat in a lifetime,” Andrews wrote to Spitzer in hopes of joining his team. Spitzer hired him to write about Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, which was one of Andrews’ favorite places. Before the piece could run, the magazine was sold and the review was never published. It succeeded, however, in igniting a singular enthusiasm in its author.
Andrews’ first restaurant reviewing job was for The Staff, an offshoot of the LA Free Press. For the column, Andrews created a character called “Mr. Food” who had a distinctly Victorian voice and invoked a lot of food-related puns and homonyms. In early 1972, Andrews, a serious music lover and amateur singer and songwriter in addition to his interest in gastronomy, was hired by the publicity department of Atlantic Records; he penned press releases for such albums as Bette Midler’s and Jackson Browne’s debuts. Still writing restaurant reviews on the side, Andrews got his first expense account...and used it to visit LA’s newest restaurants. He began to seriously study wine and was a fan in particular of the wine writer Roy Brady, who espoused the notion that a wine should be judged not by its reputation or price but instead by what it smells and tastes like. Brady became his mentor in wine matters, and Andrews himself is known for his democratic approach to the seemingly fusty discipline.
Andrews left Atlantic before a year had passed to accept his first leadership role on the staff of a consumer magazine. He became the editor of Coast, a Los Angeles-based lifestyle magazine; he held the position until 1975. Meanwhile, Andrews continued his association with the music industry reviewing records for Creem, where Lester Bangs was his editor, and covering live music in the LA area for the The Hollywood Reporter and other publications. He also made radio commercials and wrote artists’ bios for several record companies and wrote liner notes for numerous albums, receiving a Grammy nomination in 1976 for notes on a special edition of Miles Davis reissues. In 1975, Lois Dwan, restaurant reviewer for The Los Angeles Times, who had read his Mr. Food pieces, asked Andrews to substitute for her while she went on vacation. This began his long association with the newspaper, in the course of which, though he was never officially on staff, he was alternately a restaurant reviewer and columnist, book reviewer and travel writer, and the editor of the paper’s travel magazine, Traveling in Style. In 1978, Andrews was hired by[Los Angeles magazine to write a monthly wine column. Once again, he took a pseudonym: Van Delanay (a pun on the phrase vin de l’année, or wine of the year). He was hired that same year as an associate editor at New West magazine, a bi-weekly California publication started by Clay Felker as a parallel to his seminal New York magazine. He was promoted a year later to senior editor. During this time he met Ruth Reichl, then the restaurant columnist for the Northern California edition of New West, who would go on to become the restaurant critic of the New York Times from 1993 to 1999, and, later, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. For a period the two were lovers, their relationship chronicled in Reichl’s memoir Comfort Me with Apples (Random House, 2002).
Andrews left New West in 1980 and began writing for Apartment Life, an urbane lifestyle magazine helmed by Dorothy Kalins. A year later that magazine was transformed into Metropolitan Home. Over the course of that magazine’s first decade, Andrews wrote dozens of articles and columns, the majority of which were about food and wine (although he also occasionally wrote about art and design, including interviews with David Hockney, Terry Allen, and Charles Moore). During this time Andrews wrote about restaurants all over the world; he was the first American reporter to introduce readers to the great French chef Guy Savoy. Perhaps most significantly, Andrews got a contract to write a book on Catalan cuisine based on an article he’d written for Met Home. Throughout the eighties he spent a great deal of time traveling to Barcelona and vicinity. The resulting book, Catalan Cuisine, published in 1988 and still in print, has become the standard reference book for restaurant kitchens in that region, and is revered by the top local chefs, including the world-renowned Ferran Adria.
After finishing his Catalan book, Andrews worked as a freelancer, writing articles for the Los Angeles Times and for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and many other publications. In 1992, Andrews published his second book, Everything on the Table: Plain Talk About Food and Wine, a collection of new and revised short pieces, and shortly thereafter he began work on a book about the cuisines of Genoa and Nice, Flavors of the Riviera: Discovering Real Mediterranean Cuisine, published in 1996. Meanwhile, in 1994, Andrews had become a founder of Saveur magazine, and in late 1995, he moved from Los Angeles to New York City. The magazine was a watershed publication, the first of its kind to delve beyond recipes and formulas and tell the stories of the people and cultures behind the food. During his tenure, Andrews won six James Beard Journalism Awards, and in 2000, Saveur became the first food magazine to win the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for General Excellence. The following year, after the magazine changed ownership, Kalins left to work for Newsweek and Andrews took over as editor-in-chief. He left Saveur in 2006, becoming the restaurant columnist for Gourmet and undertaking new book projects...the first of which, The Country Cooking of Ireland, will be published in 2009 by Chronicle Books.
Despite his association with Barcelona, the two cities that most shaped Andrews’ passion for food, he has said, were Paris and Rome. He first visited the former in 1965, during which he was guided by an old friend of his father’s, Claude Caspar-Jordan, the administrative director of Associated Press France. Meals with Caspar-Jordan forever changed Andrews, and the two would dine together in Paris at least once a year for 28 years more until the Frenchman’s death; Andrews wrote a moving account of their times together called Paris Authentique that appeared in the twelfth issue of Saveur (May/June 1996). On repeated trips to Rome throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s to visit an American friend who had moved to there, Andrews made a serious study of Italian food, paying particular attention to the Romans’ style and pace of eating, and it left an indelible impression. “Rome made me,” he has written.
1992...1994: Editor, Traveling in Style, the Los Angeles Times travel magazine (thriceyearly); editor, numerous Los Angeles Times travel section special editions
1976: Editor, “The Hollywood Reporter Annual”
1972—1977: Editorial consulting (clients included Filmex [the Los Angeles InternationalFilm Exposition], the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, and Picture Magazine)
Author of an estimated 2,500 freelance articles, essays, and reviews about food, wine, travel, music, art, architecture, design, the entertainment industry, social issues, etc., between 1966 and the present. Publications include Bon Appétit, Chicago Sun-Times, Christian Science Monitor, Creem, Food & Wine, the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Free Press, Los Angeles Magazine (wine columnist, 1978—1988), the Los Angeles Times (variously restaurant news columnist, Friday restaurant reviewer, travel writer, and Sunday magazine contributor, 1972—1992), the Mail on Sunday (UK), Metropolitan Home (principal food writer and editor, 1982—1990), Musica Jazz (Italy), Phonograph Record Magazine, the Radio Times (UK), the Sunday Telegraph Magazine (UK), and Travel & Leisure.
2007James Beard Foundation Award: Best Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes. Ireland: Farm to Fork: Special Issue, Saveur, Issue 91, March 2006.
2004James Beard Foundation Award: Best Magazine Writing on Wine and Spirits. Article: Treasures of the Land, Saveur, Issue 71, December 2003.
2000James Beard Foundation Award: Best Magazine Series. Article: Venice special series, Saveur, Issue 38, November 1999.
1999James Beard Foundation Awards: Best Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes and Best American Cookbook (for Saveur Cooks Authentic American, with co-author Dorothy Kalins). Burgundy: Special Issue; Saveur, Issue 30, November 1998.
1998James Beard Foundation M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Article: "[1]. Saveur, Issue 18, April 1997.
1996International Association of Cooking Professionals Bert Greene Award for magazine food journalism.
1985Named to Who’s Who of Cooking in America (one of the first 50 figures to win this honor)
1976Grammy nomination, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, for Best Liner Notes
Andrews’ godmother was Kathryn Brown, wife of actor and comedian Joe E. Brown (Show Boat, Some Like It Hot, etc.) While living in Atlanta, Andrews wrote some of his first (unsold) articles on a portable typewriter lent to him by Ralph McGill, the legendary editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to whom a friend of Andrews’ father had introduced him. From 2000 to 2006, Andrews performed several times a year as a guest vocalist with the Texas-based chefs’ band The Barbwires.
